After defending WikiLeaks late last year, hactivist collective Anonymous may have just scooped it.
At midnight last night an Anonymous member who goes by the Twitter handle OperationLeakS released a series of e-mails with an employee at a Bank of America subsidiary, who is accusing the bank of fraud through inappropriately tracking loan documents. (WikiLeaks claimed last year that it had a trove of damaging, and as-yet-unreleased data about Bank of America that could take the bank down.)
The e-mails, between OperationLeakS and the Balboa employee, claim among other things that the bank is run “like a cult.”
How damning is the leak? Forbes’ Wall Street writer Halah Touryalai has taken a look and says it’s “tough to tell if there’s anything truly damning” about them. Meanwhile some of the leaks from bankofamericasuck.com have been removed, and a Bank of America spokesman told Reuters that the bank is “confident that [the former employee's] extravagant assertions are untrue.”
However inconclusive the e-mails may be, the leak may have wider implications for Anonymous as it gradually proves itself a source of comeuppance for disgruntled employees with damning information about a company or institution. “A lot depends on the impact of this week,” says Gabriella Coleman, a professor at NYU who is researching Anonymous, adding that the online collective could go in a similar direction to WikiLeaks.